Open Journal Systems, also known as OJS, is an

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

and

free software Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...

for the management of

peer-review Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work ( peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer review ...

academic journals An academic journal (or scholarly journal or scientific journal) is a periodical publication in which scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. They serve as permanent and transparent forums for the dissemination, scr ...

, created by the

Public Knowledge Project The Public Knowledge Project (PKP) is a non-profit research initiative that is focused on the importance of making the results of publicly funded research freely available through open access policies, and on developing strategies for making thi ...

, and released under the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first ...

History

Open Journal Systems (OJS) was conceived to facilitate the development of

open access Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which nominally copyrightable publications are delivered to readers free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 de ...

peer-reviewed Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work ( peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer review ...

publishing, providing the technical infrastructure for the presentation of journal articles along with an editorial-management workflow, including article submission, peer-review, and indexing. OJS relies upon individuals fulfilling different roles, such as journal manager, editor, reviewer, author, and reader. It has a module that supports subscription journals. Like other community-based projects such as

WordPress WordPress (WP, or WordPress.org) is a web content management system. It was originally created as a tool to publish blogs but has evolved to support publishing other web content, including more traditional websites, electronic mailing list, ma ...

, the software has a plugin architecture, which allows new features to be integrated without changing its core

codebase In software development, a codebase (or code base) is a collection of source code used to build a particular software system, application, or software component. Typically, a codebase includes only human-written source code system files; thu ...

. Available plugins facilitate indexing in

Google Scholar Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of Academic publishing, scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in Beta release, beta in November 2004, th ...

and

PubMed Central PubMed Central (PMC) is a free digital repository that archives open access full-text scholarly articles that have been published in biomedical and life sciences journals. As one of the major research databases developed by the National Cente ...

, publishing

RSS RSS ( RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is a web feed that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format. Subscribing to RSS feeds can allow a user to keep track of many ...

Atom Atoms are the basic particles of the chemical elements. An atom consists of a atomic nucleus, nucleus of protons and generally neutrons, surrounded by an electromagnetically bound swarm of electrons. The chemical elements are distinguished fr ...

web syndication feeds, and providing COUNTER statistics about online usage, several plugins are curated and directly available for download through its plugin gallery interface. OJS is also

LOCKSS The LOCKSS ("Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe") project, under the auspices of Stanford University, is a peer-to-peer network that develops and supports an open source system allowing libraries to collect, preserve and provide their readers with ac ...

-compliant, which helps ensure ongoing access to journal contents. Third-party plugins include Reading Tools, which point readers to related studies, media stories, and policy documents in open access databases, the Better Password plugin, which forces the users to use strong passwords, and many others freely available in GitHub. OJS also provides custom themes, which might be added to the installation through its plugin gallery and a demo installation to experiment its features.

Versions

OJS is currently in its 3.4.0-7 version, released on August 23, 2024. Its first version was originally released in 2001. The software possesses an open well defined development roadmap and a set of milestones. The software is written in

PHP PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared towards web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by the PHP Group. ...

, currently supports two databases,

MySQL MySQL () is an Open-source software, open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A rel ...

MariaDB MariaDB is a community-developed, commercially supported Fork (software development), fork of the MySQL relational database management system (RDBMS), intended to remain free and open-source software under the GNU General Public License. Developm ...

and

PostgreSQL PostgreSQL ( ) also known as Postgres, is a free and open-source software, free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance. PostgreSQL features transaction processing, transactions ...

, and can be hosted on a

Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X, *nix or *NIX) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Uni ...

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

web server. Note: OJS 2 reached its end of life in 2021, its latest release was the version 2.4.8-5, released in May 2019. When upgrading from the version 2.x to 3.x, some care must be taken given that several features have been added and removed, especially if the installation has hand-made customizations.

Translations

As of version 3.3.0, the software has been translated into 50 languages: Arabic, Armenian, Basque, Belarusian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, Gaelic, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kazakh, Kurdish, Macedonian, Malay, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese, with many additional languages (including Uzbek, Urdu, Sinhala, Lithuanian, Korean, and Mongolian) in development. Translations are created and maintained by the user community.

Documentation

PKP maintains an extensive documentation hub where users can find documentation about all of its systems. The documentation covers basic software usage, migration instructions, development practices, accessibility, video tutorials and the content has been translated partially into other languages. PKP also provides extensive documentation on governance and policies.

Usage

A user community has developed around the software, with active participants, and enhancements being contributed to the project from the (IBICT), the ''

Journal of Medical Internet Research The ''Journal of Medical Internet Research'' is a peer-reviewed open-access medical journal established in 1999 covering eHealth and "healthcare in the Internet age". The editors-in-chief are Gunther Eysenbach and Rita Kukafka. The publisher is JMI ...

'', and others. A growing body of publications and documentation is available on the project's website. As of mid-2021, OJS was being used by at least 25,000 journals worldwide. A daily updated map showing the location of these journals is also available on PKP's website. A survey in 2010 found that about half were in the developing world. The

is also collaborating with the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP) to develop scholarly research portals in Africa, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Vietnam. In

Venezuela Venezuela, officially the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, is a country on the northern coast of South America, consisting of a continental landmass and many Federal Dependencies of Venezuela, islands and islets in the Caribbean Sea. It com ...

, at least 32 independent organizations, public and private universities publish 230 journals using this platform. OJS, as well as the Érudit publishing system, is being used in the Synergies project, creating a scholarly portal for Canadian social sciences and humanities research. OJS is also being used for research portals in Brazil, Spain, Italy, and Greece.

Hosting

OJS hosting service is offered for a fee by the PKP, Publishing Services (PKP-operated Publishing Services), as well as a variety of third-party commercial and non-commercial service providers not affiliated with PKP. PKP has also released a Docker container in

GitHub GitHub () is a Proprietary software, proprietary developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code. It uses Git to provide distributed version control and GitHub itself provides access control, bug trackin ...

, which may be helpful to spin-up an OJS instance without having to deal with the web server, database and PHP installation. The container is still in beta, so it should be used only for testing purposes.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Open Journal Systems Free software programmed in PHP 2001 software Publication management software Open access (publishing) Free institutional repository software